The Morning Wrap: The Grim Reality Of Dalits In Politics; Budget On Feb 1 On Two Conditions

Our selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers.

The Morning Wrap is HuffPost India's selection of interesting news and opinion from the day's newspapers. Subscribe here to receive it in your inbox each weekday morning.

Essential HuffPost

Despite the fact that reserving constituencies for Dalits was not meant to debar their from unreserved constituencies, political parties have shut out Dalit candidates from 'general' seats, ensuring that these seats have become, in effect, reserved for non-Dalits, HuffPost India's analysis of election data from Uttar Pradesh and Lok Sabha elections shows.

About 96,000 litres of fuel have been airlifted to Manipur in the last 24 hours by the Indian Air Force (IAF). Manipur that is under a blockade and cut-off from mainland India since November 2016, had fuel enough to last for a day.

Tamil Nadu on Monday passed a law legalising the conduct of Jallikattu — the popular bull taming sport — in the state which was banned by the Supreme Court in 2014. The law now replaces the ordinance that was promulgated amending the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals Act on January 21.

Main News

The Central Bureau of Investigation arrested eight people last night, including former IDBI Bank chairman Yogesh Aggarwal and the now-defunct Kingfisher Airline's ex-CFO A Raghunathan, in a seven-year-old case related to a ₹900-crore loan default by the Vijay Mallya-promoted airlines company.

The Election Commission permitted the government to present the Union Budget on February 1 on two conditions: the Finance Minister should not announce new schemes specific to Uttar Pradesh, Punjab, Goa, Uttarakhand and Manipur; and, second, the government should not, in the budget speech, highlight its achievements in the five poll-bound states.

As several anti-India posters came up among the crowd protesting against the ban on Jallikattu at Marina Beach in Chennai, the Centre sought a report from the state government of Tamil Nadu on the situation. The Union home ministry is monitoring the developments keenly.

Off The Front Page

Just a day after the political launch of Priyanka Gandhi, talk gathered momentum in Congress circles that her growing organisational footprint may culminate with her contesting the Lok Sabha polls in 2019 from Rae Bareli in place of her mother, Sonia, who has been forced to scale down her political engagements due to indifferent health.

A 22-year-old man was arrested from Delhi for allegedly sexually assaulting his two teenage sisters over the last nine months, police said on Monday. The accused allegedly raped his 17-year-old sister for the first time in April, 2016, and molested his 13-year-old sibling around the same time. Since then he had been sexually abusing them.

Two railways personnel, Mohammad Manjoor Alam and Ramesh Prajapati, foiled an attempt to derail a passenger train in Samastipur district, around 90 km northeast of Patna, in the early hours today. A few months ago pressure cooker bombs had been planted on tracks in East Champaran by a man who allegedly claimed he was working on the instructions of a Dubai-based operative of Pakistan's ISI.

Opinion

To stir and shake the classical environment, the Urur Olcott Kuppam Vizha, an alternative music platform to the hegemony of classical music, dominated by the upper castes, this year brings the non-classical and marginalised art traditions into classically tagged spaces. Read TM Krishna's exposition in The Hindu here.

The New Right in India is nothing but the old Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) ideology repackaged into a new form, writes Shamsul Islam in The Indian Express. From the rightwing's distrust of democracy to the call for "strong leaders", the signs are all there to give credence to this claim.

In The Telegraph, Manish Nandy takes a fair guess at what Donald Trump's foreign policy may look like and puts together a rather grim prognosis of the things to comes. But it's difficult to project the nature of the changes exactly as "Trump is no disciplined politician". "He speaks and tweets as he pleases and often sides with both sides of an issue, contradicting himself merrily," he writes.